Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) products are widely utilized in many applications, including refrigeration, air conditioning, foam expansion, and as propellants for aerosol products including medical aerosol devices. Although HFC's have proven to be more climate friendly than the chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbon products that they replaced, it has now been discovered that they exhibit an appreciable global warming potential (GWP).
The search for more acceptable alternatives to current fluorocarbon products has led to the emergence of hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) products. Relative to their predecessors, HFOs are expected to exert less impact on the atmosphere in the form their much lower GWP. Advantageously, HFO's also exhibit low flammability and low toxicity.
As the environmental, and thus, economic importance of HFO's has developed, so has the demand for precursors utilized in their production. Many desirable HFO compounds, e.g., such as 2,3,3,3-tetrafluoroprop-1-ene, may typically be produced utilizing feedstocks of chlorocarbons, and in particular, chlorinated propanes and/or propenes, which may also find use as feedstocks for the manufacture of polyurethane blowing agents, biocides and polymers.
Unfortunately, many chlorinated propenes may have limited commercial availability, and/or may only be available at prohibitively high cost. This may be due at least in part to the fact that conventional processes for their manufacture may require the use of raw materials and/or starting materials that are prohibitively expensive, or otherwise too limited in the throughputs that can be achieved, to be economically produced by manufacturers on the large scale required to be useful as feedstocks.
For example, some conventional processes may require highly chlorinated propanes or propenes as starting materials that are, in turn, prepared from raw materials that are not generally readily available. Such raw materials may be produced in limited quantities as by-products of other processes, or, may be produced by processes that may be less than optimal in terms of selectivity and/or yield, process operating and/or capital cost, safety, and/or environmental acceptability.
It would thus be desirable to provide improved processes for the production of raw materials useful in the synthesis of chlorocarbon precursors that in turn, are useful as feedstocks in the synthesis of refrigerants and other commercial products. More particularly, such processes would provide an improvement over the current state of the art if they provided a commercially useful yield and/or selectivity, were operable under lower intensity, and thus safer, conditions.